SpaceX Crew-11 launches to the ISS

Florida's summer clouds nearly won twice. After weather scrubbed the first attempt on 31 July, Falcon 9 threaded a gap in the cumulus at 11:43 a.m. Eastern on 1 August 2025 and lifted Dragon Endeavour off pad 39A. The capsule riding uphill was an icon: the same Endeavour that carried Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on Demo-2 in 2020, the flight that returned crewed launch to America, now making a record sixth trip to orbit.

The four people inside carried their own histories. Commander Zena Cardman, a geobiologist who had worked in Antarctica, was finally flying after being pulled from Crew-9 a year earlier so the Starliner astronauts could ride home in her seat. Pilot Mike Fincke, on his fourth flight, had flown the final voyage of shuttle Endeavour in 2011 and now flew a Dragon of the same name. JAXA's Kimiya Yui returned for his second mission, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov made his first, flying under the NASA-Roscosmos seat-swap agreement.

The ride to the station was the fastest a crew Dragon had ever flown. Endeavour docked at the zenith port of the Harmony module at 2:26 a.m. Eastern on 2 August, 14 hours and 43 minutes after liftoff, and the booster's touchdown back at Cape Canaveral was itself a piece of history, the final landing at Landing Zone 1 before the storied pad was retired. The crew joined Expedition 73 for what was planned as a six-month increment of research.

The mission's ending broke new ground of a harder kind. In orbit, Fincke suffered a medical event that briefly left him unable to speak, and in January 2026 NASA decided to bring the crew home about a month early. Endeavour splashed down in the Pacific off Southern California before dawn on 15 January 2026 in what amounted to the first medically shortened US station increment, executed so smoothly that NASA officials described the operation as the agency at its finest.